knowledge bank

When it comes to use of social media in development, development institutions remind me of lumbering elephants walking down the autobahn. In any other sphere, development organizations would not be at such a disadvantage. We have been building roads for ever. There has not been any fundamental change in the technology of building roads. Development organizations learnt slowly but well about development challenges in various sectors and are now legitimate experts in these areas. All the same the title of “knowledge institutions” is a bit hard to swallow. The reason, probably somewhat unfair, is that knowledge today, for most people is intimately tied to technology, social media too is viewed as a medium for knowledge, much like the network of roads and highways are a medium for commerce.

Everyone likes a happy ending and this applies in development work too. Quite often, we have the tendency to showcase our successes through best practices that are upheld as evidence that a particular approach works. But what about those instances when we may have made some mistakes along the way or failed outright? Humans have a tendency to focus on successes rather than failures.

"This [handling of failure] is difficult for us to do well because we have strong human bias to value successes more than we value failures. In most organizations failure is stigmatized and nobody wants to be associated with it…..Unfortunately this produces some dangerous side-effects. Since improbable failures have high information content, it is important to communicate information about failure quickly and widely throughout the organization. To the extent that we hinder the flow of this information, we will force people to reinvent failures that we have already experienced, and that generates no useful new information."